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Eggs and Endorphins

2/7/06 06:34 pm - Why Blogs?

I was mulling over with Lisa the idea that blogs, and decentralized mouthpieces in general, have emerged as a solution to the Usenet Problem -- that there are too many people talking.

In essence, there are just too many people. Too many to listen to them all, too many to read, too many to have anything resembling discourse.

The solution is the blogosphere. By decenteralizing the flow of information, people are allowed to flow into clusters, of size based on how much people are comfortable reading, and how many people form a community. So rather than a few small pulpits, from which only the loudest can be heard and which only those with huge amounts of time on their hands can hear, there are many small ones. Some are very highly populated. Some are not. And some people have a far larger community than others -- either in terms of reading, being read, or both. But this way, the conversational flow can continue in the face of a continual flood of people -- and almost any other way, it doesn't.

The problem is that when everyone watches a different subset of the data stream, longer conversations are difficult. (For example, how often do I go back to check other comments to the same LJ post that I've commented to?)

It depends. LJ is particularly bad for this -- it's really not good at letting you follow a continuing conversation.

The larger blogosphere just has people post comments on their own blogs and uses trackbacks to link them to the original posts -- but lj's security model doesn't really work well for that, at least in theory.

OTOH, I think this is a case (for LJ, anyway) of the technology not keeping up with usage rather than an intrinsic flaw.